Robert Bly Critical Essay | Critical Review by Alan Helms

Critical Review by Alan Helms

SOURCE: Helms, Alan. Review of Sleepers Joining Hands, by Robert Bly. Partisan Review 44, no. 2 (1977): 284-93.

In the following review of Sleepers Joining Hands, Helms judges Bly's forays into the Whitmanesque and the confessional mode of poetry to be lacking.

The experience of reading Sleepers Joining Hands, Robert Bly's first large-press book since his National Book Award winning The Light Around The Body, is a bit like slogging your way through a violent storm.

The book begins in deceptive calm, with “Six Winter Privacy Poems”:

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When I woke, new snow had fallen. I am alone, yet someone else is with me, drinking coffee, looking out at the snow.

Bly's central theme, beautifully rendered: the duality of inner and outer worlds, the deep duality of a consciousness often conflicted but existing here in a momentary state of peaceful coexistence. It's the American haiku, fully and quietly accomplished. Compare...
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